Comment by sometimes_all

Yeah it was an absolute nightmare trying to figure out the difference, and I still do not know the correct answer to this, and by the looks of it, neither does Google support, because they were as clueless as I was when I asked them about it.

One thing I read on a reddit thread [1] was that the AI pro 2 TB plan explicitly allows sharing the AI and storage benefits when you enable family sharing on them, while the 5 TB plan doesn't.

However, when I went to sign up, the 5 TB plan wasn't available at all! It's only their lite and basic plans (the one with 30 and 100 GB of storage); the 5TB one only showed up after I signed up for the pro plan, and judging by how the UX looked, you pay an extra amount on top of your AI pro plan.

Now I definitely need family sharing, but I don't need the full 2 TB, let alone 5 TB, so I didn't bother checking further about the 5TB plan.

Also, I am in India, maybe things are different in your region?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleOne/comments/1nib21a/solved_g...

From what I can see the 2TB AI pro and 5TB (non AI) are the same, except the google drive storage.

The difference between the AI and non-AI 2TB plan is 1000 AI "credits" (tokens?) vs 200. €120 p/a difference between the two for me which is huge.

I agree with you 100%. We do syncs to another non-google storage account anyway, plus the google accounts are primarily for Android phone usage because photos and videos take up quite a big chunk of space now; they do not have any legitimately important files stored outside of photos sync and phone backups, so there is no deep loss if the account gets banned outside of some inconveniences.

This has never happened to me in more than 5 years of paying for Google Drive. And my drive is chock full of bootleg books and movies and stuff.

Having said that, an offline backup of a couple of terabytes will rarely break the bank and is not a bad idea at all.

I probably need to get on that.

Since we are on the topic of bans & Google, I have a question.

How likely or difficult is it for Google to engage in, for lack of better word, "thought policing"?

You ask your "private" AI assistant to answer a naughty question or help with problematic task(from Google's hidden list) and then you eventually face the ban hammer.

Did anybody ever get banned for searching the wrong keywords?

Solution: Use Google Drive to backup a VeraCrypt volume?

Which product do you recommend? OneDrive? Dropbox?

> With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality

Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality". Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are all stochastic machines; they'll give me a different output at different times for the very same query, with differences in quality each time within themselves, let alone other products.

I did my own checks; newer Gemini's output is consistently "good enough" for me and my family now, we individually do not use the full extent of the Pro plan (collectively, we do), and NotebookLM is something which more than one of us uses everyday; Image generation is something we use once a week or so. Given all this, the feature breadth within Gemini covers all bases for us, with a significant catch-up in quality compared to earlier to a point that we don't really need to look elsewhere for now.

Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month. So price is definitely an important point of consideration.

The same thing is true for a _ton_ of tech products. My home internet plan easily gives me more than $1000 in value per month. My cell phone hardware probably gives me $2000+ in value over even a short 2 year life. Customers still tend to choose the cheapest option that meets requirements.